You have me at a disadvantage because I don’t know much about the history of statistics, but here is my view. Assuming the core principles of Bayesian statistics were demonstrably effective, if they were widely accepted and then later rejected or neglected for whatever reason, then that would be regression. If Bayes’ and Laplace’s methods never caught on at all until a long time later, and there were no other significant advances in the field, then that would be stagnation.
By these (admittedly my own) definitions, evolutionary biology didn’t regress after Darwin because the only parts of his theory that were neglected were the ones that weren’t yet provable. It’s as if, theoretically, Bayes came up with a variety of statistical methods, most of which were clearly effective but others were of dubious utility. It wouldn’t count as a regression, at least to me, if later generations dropped the dubious methods but kept the useful ones.
That’s a pretty good argument for reading the work of the old masters though, isn’t it?
I apologize, I haven’t made my position clear about this. I think that experts should read the classics as well as modern works in their field. The interested amateur, though, should skip over the classics and go directly to modern thought, unless he or she has more free time than most.
You have me at a disadvantage because I don’t know much about the history of statistics, but here is my view. Assuming the core principles of Bayesian statistics were demonstrably effective, if they were widely accepted and then later rejected or neglected for whatever reason, then that would be regression. If Bayes’ and Laplace’s methods never caught on at all until a long time later, and there were no other significant advances in the field, then that would be stagnation.
By these (admittedly my own) definitions, evolutionary biology didn’t regress after Darwin because the only parts of his theory that were neglected were the ones that weren’t yet provable. It’s as if, theoretically, Bayes came up with a variety of statistical methods, most of which were clearly effective but others were of dubious utility. It wouldn’t count as a regression, at least to me, if later generations dropped the dubious methods but kept the useful ones.
I apologize, I haven’t made my position clear about this. I think that experts should read the classics as well as modern works in their field. The interested amateur, though, should skip over the classics and go directly to modern thought, unless he or she has more free time than most.